MESH and Multi Hop

B_Tyler
Here to help

MESH and Multi Hop

I have a requirement to extend a LAN via MESH to a couple buildings, one building I have line of site from the gateway AP and one building that I do not have line of site to.  The building I do have LOS to sits between the gateway and the    remote non LOS building. Distance is approximately 500 feet between buildings.  Am I able to put (2) MESH APs on the middle building, one pointing to the gateway AP and one pointing to the remote building?  Would these need to be connected via a switch in the middle building?

5 REPLIES 5
BrechtSchamp
Kind of a big deal

Check the following documentation:

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Extending_the_LAN_with_a_Wireless...

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Deployment_Guides/Mesh_Deployment_Guide

 

You'll see that it is indeed possible to have such a setup. The switch can help in the sense that the two central APs don't need to use airtime for their mesh communication. Note that this switch cannot be used for any client devices without introducing a router.

 

In your setup a client will be two mesh hops away from the gateway access point. This will reduce the clients' speeds to 25%, which is not ideal. There's also only a single mesh path.

 

In the buildings themselves, are you just going to use wireless clients? Or were you planning to put a switch? If you wanted to put a switch, you need to introduce a new router in each building. In that case, you may be better off looking at a purpose designed point-to-point or point-to-multipoint solution that behaves more like a black box link between the buildings. They typically use the 60GHz band for the backhaul network. In the buildings themselves you then have your switches and access points as you normally would.

Thanks, in both remote buildings I'll have indoor APs (MR52 I believe) connected to a L3 switch as well as the MR74 on the roof of the buildings.  The center building will have (2) MR74s, one point to the gateway, one pointed to the remote building.  I'm not too worried about bandwidth, there will only be 1 or 2 iPads in use at each location used to enter electrical meter readings in a industrial control room a couple times a day.

I see. Wouldn't you be better off just putting a SIM in the iPads then?

The customer is using that to some extent today.  Cell coverage is bad in most of the buildings as the iPads need to operate 2-3 stories underground.

We wanted to confirm the same use case - but i can say - not with standard meraki antenna! 


Alter 60-80 meters (200-260 feet) the connection would be really bad...


Sorry...

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